New Testingstan

It's okay, a lot of the time just talking at people helps.

I was thinking about it some more, because I had this difficulty in how to make 'girl-meets-robot' work. While I want to change Sol Gundam in substance, I'm not really interested in building the whole setting from scratch, in part because I'm pretty fond of them. Anyway, one of the elements was that mobile suits were such cutting edge machines on the avant garde that normal people couldn't hope to effectively control them, or even survive a ride in one. All the pilots were Arahans, rebuilt-by-nanomachines-under-the-Bodhi-Tree-cyborgs-from-the-far-edge-of-the-kung-fu-singularity. It's kind of hard to explain without it sounding stupid, but it became a pretty deep element that I wouldn't want to jettison, but it's not a thing you can really just drop into a teenager's lap in an action-packed opening chapter, if you follow me.

But then I thought 'why not just arbitrarily limit mobile suits to children?' Another element of the setting was how children were rare, because immortality had been cracked and people weren't inclined to have children or have long term relationships like marriage, and the people who did do so were just doing it out of vanity. The two normal protagonists were on the run from parents who had created them as part of elaborate social ploys. Maybe I'm too harsh on the previous generation, but I see things in life sometimes where parents end up destroying any future their children might have. Sometimes I feel like I dodged a bullet with regards to my father, but I know that a lot of kids never got that chance to get out from under the thumb of a bad parent. It's also kind of true to form to build something out of 'adults are bullshit (and sometimes kids are bullshit too)'.

I have returned because i am being consumed by this idle idea and feel the need to write it down somewhere so I can give it way forever.

Basically Halo 4 is coming out soon and because it was a free gift with my new Xbox I decided to play through Reach. Like all the Halo games it wasn't very good but there were some parts I thought were kind of cool, like the alien dance party in a nightclub and a jetpack race in a hospital. Anyway it got me thinking about 'military science fiction' and space war dramas (which I personally distinguish to feel good about myself ). Halo, like a lot military SF, is basically just Vietnam or World War II in space. Everything seems so technologically backwards, even if sequences like the multi-stage launch in Reach are visually appealing. On top of that, despite being framed as a super soldier you're never playing someone all that super. The Master Chief is just a dude with regenerating health. Even Crysis, oft cited as doing super soldiers 'right', has a guy that can sprint pretty fast for a couple of seconds. It's a bit lame really.

So I got to thinking how I would do it. This is definitely not a thing that could be anything else other than a video game, but obviously it cannot even be that. In any case, it's something of an 'Anti-Halo'.

One of the things that regularly comes up amongst nerds is how people in the future should just be using robots to fight. Sometimes this is valid, often it's not. However I think it might be interesting if the battlefields of this setting really were just populated by robots, with human beings appearing rarely if at all. The primary character would even be such a robot. A new model combat gynoid with all the latest hardware and software that puts it a cut above the average robot in that weight class. All the widgets. Honeycombed graphene bones, carbon-nitrogen-boron nanotubes, diamonoid brains operating on phonons, quantum tunneling robot limbic systems, whatever. But rather than just being fluff, this little robot is serious business. Like this business, but you know in a shooter. Robots come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, but the ones people have to interact with most regularly, the ones that have to play the role of interface between ordinary people in theater and command up in space, look human enough.

I'm fascinated by 'robopsychology', and have all these images of the primary robot in conversation with an actual psychologist between missions. The robot, I like the name Vivi, is literally an emotionless killing machine that fakes sociability in order to interact with humans. Never lying, always obedient. When asked the question 'why do you think you look the way you do' the answer given is 'because it makes orga more comfortable with exploiting me' without ever passing judgment. I mean most shooter protagonists don't have much in the way of personality so you can take this as some kind of postmodern commentary in that regard, but I think that narratively there's something in exploring how human beings try to relate to this human-like tool that is becoming increasingly central to the unfolding of history. Are they scared, jealous, incredulous and so on.

An additional and frankly kind of random element is how every human is psychokinetic. Like pretty seriously so, even. It's just not critical because robots have way too many other advantages.